It’s June 11th, your birthday again. I’m writing this to you on the 17th anniversary of the day I received the phone call informing me that you had chosen to end your life, the phone call that makes me now, even so many years later, dread and avoid it’s beckoning call. It’s the day you left me, your brother, a wife and two young daughters behind to travel to the great beyond, to the place where pain holds no sway. You’ve missed a lot. The first year, you missed the sight of me wailing and keening in group therapy, while battering furniture with an impotent padded bataka before crumbling into the arms of virtual strangers to weep your loss. You missed your wife succumbing to drug addiction, your eldest daughter having three children before the age of 16, and your youngest having her only child, your grandson, taken by child protective services after making the front page of the Oregonian when the baby daddy took him hostage after she threatened to leave him for a beating. And you thought they’d be better off without you. I remained behind to be able to tell you that it just ain’t so. You missed your father’s funeral, that monster created by the Viet Nam war, that abused you, sent you to foster care, and made you too sensitive to injustice to bear this world. You missed seeing that, unlike your funeral, it was so sparsely attended that there weren’t enough people to carry the coffin to its final resting place. But enough about vindication—you’ve missed so much more. You missed my getting my motorcycle license, despite having spent hours picking gravel from your back after your motorcycle accident. We could have ridden together, could have smelled the pines and alfalfa, could have howled together at the sheer beauty and freedom of it all. You missed my college graduation, with honors, against all the odds stacked in our disfavor. You even missed the election of the first black president Today, what I’m remembering most is you, at ten, dressed in your little cowboy outfit with your guitar (they were determined to make money off us, even if it meant creating child country singing stars) singing the classic Hank Williams song “Honky Tonk Man”. How your man-child’s voice quavered with shy confidence as you comically wiggled your eyebrows over your soulful brown eyes, your smile dimpling, as you sang “I’m a honky tonk man, and I can’t seem to stop. I wanna give the girls a whirl to the rhythm of the old juke box, but when my money’s all gone, I’m on the telephone, sayin’ hey, hey, mama, can your daddy come home”. Maybe, if you’d waited just a little longer, she would have said yes.